Anyone with a normal brain has the capacity to do almost anything, but when one has special gifts or talents (and everyone has) and takes advantage of and develops these talents – that person is likely to excel.

...but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force...

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see. With people with only modest ability, modesty is mere honesty; but with those who possess great talent, it is hypocrisy.

Arthur Schopenhauer, as quoted in The Little Book of Bathroom Philosophy: Daily Wisdom from the Greatest Thinkers (2004) by Gregory Bergman, p. 137.

The way to attain to larger gifts is to employ the gifts you have. Give Jesus the one talent, and then He may trust you with two. If you cannot speak glibly in a prayer-meeting, then stammer out your heart's thanks in the best fashion you can. It may be that your few broken words may accomplish more than another man's fluent harangues.

Men of splendid talents are generally too quick, too volatile, too adventurous, and too unstable to be much relied on; whereas men of common abilities, in a regular, plodding routine of business, act with more regularity and greater certainty. Men of the best intellectual abilities are apt to strike off suddenly, like the tangent of a circle, and cannot be brought into their orbits by attraction or gravity — they often act with such eccentricity as to be lost in the vortex of their own reveries. Brilliant talents in general are like the ignes fatui; they excite wonder, but often mislead. They are not, however, without their use; like the fire from the flint, once produced, it may be converted, by solid, thinking men, to very salutary and noble purposes.

The man that wrapped up his talent in the napkin and said, "Lo, there thou hast that is thine," was too sanguine. There was never an unused talent rolled up in a handkerchief yet, but when it was taken out and put into the scales, it was lighter than when it was committed to the keeping of the earth.

"Take therefore the talent from him." It is being taken away rapidly, and the shreds of it will very soon be all that is left. Your religious nature will finally become a virtually exterminated organ. The purpose you have at some future time to use your talent avails nothing. It is going from you, and, before you know it, will be utterly, irrevocably gone. My friends, there is not an hour to lose. Only with the greatest difficulty will you be able, now, to gather up yourself and open your closing gates to the entrance of God and His salvation.